Previous patent disclosures have described a basic arrangement of apparatus for spoken access to large lists of items and techniques for rapid search within such lists, particularly when they can be given a hierarchical field structure, such as is the case for names and addresses. The obvious approach to handling these variations is simply to include them in additional valid sequences. However, if all the allowed sequences were listed individually, the size of the list to be searched, and hence the computational effort, would be increased enormously. Typical variations in the US names and addresses example would increase the size of the list by over 50 times.